Lost Ark Team Update - Letter to the Community

Published by 20 Apr, 2023 0 likes

Heroes of Arkesia, Our teams at Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG met recently to discuss player feedback, share insights, and talk about the next steps for Lost Ark in the West.

The dust hasn’t settled yet and our teams have a lot of work on the horizon to materialize these conversations, but we wanted to share our thoughts and plans with you.

We’d like to start off with a huge ‘thank you’ from both of our teams before we dive in. The love and dedication shown by so many while playing Lost Ark has been inspirational.

While we’re extraordinarily grateful to see the excitement around the recent updates, we understand that you are still experiencing inconveniences and pain-points.

Last year, our top priorities were introducing content into the Western shores of Arkesia at an appropriate cadence to avoid burnout, working to pull forward quality of life (QoL) changes, and waging the war on bots.

Now, our goal is to continually improve the Lost Ark experience, while layering in the exciting content that has yet to arrive.

Many updates and changes are required to achieve this goal, and that’s only half of it— to constantly work on creating a better game, we need to listen to our player base and ensure that you feel heard so we can build a better game together.

We recognize that we’ve fallen short of accomplishing our desired relationship. Like the game itself, our current goal is to continue to grow, improve, and foster a better connection.

As we work to set the best course for the rest of 2023 and beyond, you’ll find some of our thoughts and plans below.

These are focused on areas of player feedback and directional goals, not content coming to Arkesia over the coming months.

While you might still find one or two spoilers, we’ll be following up with the 2023 Roadmap - Part 2 next week to share those plans.

The War Against BotsOne of our top priorities over the last year was taking care of the bot problem.

Enormous effort was made on both Smilegate RPG and Amazon Games’ part, and together we’ve implemented a variety of changes to restrict bots from exploiting the system to gain economic benefits.

During this process, we realized new players may be hindered from progressing, like not getting enough gold for honing.

We’ll keep an eye on these unwanted side-effects, and actively work to resolve them. Material accumulation by bots also requires action.

We have banned millions of bot accounts in an ongoing effort, but the materials they have produced still pose a risk of inflation.

We will continue to take strong actions against RMT participants, and will take future action based on both gold and other materials' production figures.

Many technical measures have been developed and tested, and we will continue to invest in future measures.

Specific tactics can't be revealed for security reasons, but we can assure you that we are keenly monitoring bot activity patterns and are ready to respond to their modified activity.

While it will be difficult to ever completely remove bots from Lost Ark, we've made significant progress in limiting the impact they have on gameplay and the economy.